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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY - AMERICAN |
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Select: Woodow Wilson -- Louis D. Brandeis -- Thorstein Veblen John Dewey -- James Hayden Tufts - Benjamin N. Cardozo Woodrow Wilson (picture), the 28th president of the United States (1913-1921), was born in Virginia, and became president of Princeton University in 1902. In 1910 he became governor of New Jersey. Elected president in 1912 against Theodore Roosevelt and Taft, he initiated antitrust legislation and secured social reforms in his progressive "New Freedom" program. He strove to keep the United States neutral during World War I, but the German U-boat campaign forced him to declare war in 1917. Most of Wilson's admirers hold that his idealism enhanced his statesmanship while most of his adversaries assert that it was his idealism that led him astray. But neither his sound nor his erroneous judgments and measures can be explained by his philosophical or religious attitude alone. At times, Wilson, the idealist, was rightly considered "America's most practical president," and sometimes Wilson became the victim of his illusions when he tried to act as a shrewd politician. His power to exercise sound judgment increased and deteriorated independently of his idealism that always was a constant element of his personality. The mystical faith in his mission must be distinguished from his religious belief and his philosophical conviction, both of which nourished his missionary zeal but were not identical with it. He was not a man to create original ideas but rather to make the adopted ideas into living forces which had to serve his mission, and the efforts to accomplish this mission made evident the conflicting tendencies of his personality which finally caused his personal failure without refuting the principal ideas supported by him. Wilson was moved by strong emotional impulses though always on guard against his own emotions. He was a deeply convinced Christian but humility was not the significant trait of his nature. He struggled for the rights of the individual but confessed that he was "not fond of thinking of Christianity as the means of saving individual souls." Service and sacrifice of selfish interests was preached by him, and he earnestly endeavored to live and act in accordance with his teaching, but he was intolerant of any dissent. No president of the United States had studied so intensely the lives, achievements and failures of his predecessors in office as Wilson had done. The result of these studies was his firm belief that he, the President, by virtue of his election, "can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice." But in case of disagreement with the majority of the people, Wilson believed in his higher judgment. It was this mystical belief in his faculty to express the innermost thoughts of the nations that led him on a dangerous way when he tried to impose on the world a peace treaty which should be, as ex-President Taft remarked, "his and nobody's else's peace" because he claimed to know better than anyone else the meaning of justice. It was not vanity that let him make such assumptions. If Wilson did not distrust his convictions he at least steadily distrusted his emotions. His motives have been best expressed in Kipling's poem If, which Wilson regarded as his personal credo, and which he carried in his pocket and later had framed to hang beside him when he died, a hero in defeat. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Notable as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis (picture) was a juridical heretic, who had the satisfaction of seeing his views acknowledged by orthodox jurists. Many of his dissenting opinions have since become the law of the land. He was greatly inspired by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a colleague of his on the Supreme Court bench, and he subsequently had great influence over his former teacher. Both of them stressed the historical development of law, the necessity of adapting legislation to the dynamic economic and social changes, and the social and broad cultural responsibilities of jurists and legislators. Both frequently dissented from the majority Court opinion. Brandeis was opposed to socialism and claimed it did not increase industrial efficiency. He was favorably inclined toward labor, small businessmen, and cooperative enterprises. Although he protested that he had no general philosophy and thought only within the context of the facts that came before him, he was not only a philosopher of law, but also a social and political philosopher. His views never lost their vital contact with the facts of daily life. He distrusted those whose reasoning bounded far ahead of the facts, and considered those thinkers inadequate whose lack of imagination did not enable their ideas to withstand the test of experience and subsequent events. He always treated opponents fairly when they indicated a willingness to compromise. He firmly believed in the ultimate possibility of reconciling the varied interests of individuals, in overcoming the antagonism between the individual and society and in espousing a basic loyalty to one's fellow man and to the community. He hoped that a humanistic education would culminate in the realization of his ideas. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Before Thorstein Veblen (picture) turned to the study of social and economic facts and theories, he had concentrated upon philosophy, especially the works of Kant, Comte and Spencer, and, in his later years, the problems of economics remained closely connected in Veblen's mind with fundamental problems of life, civilization and the general theory of science. Intending to integrate political economy into the general movement of science, Veblen discussed the evolution of the scientific point of view, the place of science within the framework of civilization, and the function of evolution within political economy. Although Veblen was strongly impressed by the doctrine of evolution, he was opposed to the simple application of the evolutionary principles to the study of social phenomena. He was also strongly opposed to positivism, and relied more upon German idealism and romanticism. He sometimes flirted with theorists of racialism like Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlain, and , if not influenced by Georges Sorel, he came in his own way very close to the latter's standpoint. Both Sorel and Veblen were inspired by Marx and criticized him by similar arguments. Both were enthusiasts of the idea of promoting industrial production by social and political changes. Also, both considered the capitalist unfit to achieve technical progress and they advocated recruitment of industrial leaders from the classes of salaried technicians and workers. Veblen's violent attacks on the business class and its ideology have caused violent controversies in America. In Europe Veblen remained nearly unknown. Brought up in a clannish community of immigrants from Norway, Veblen never became completely at ease with the American way of living. He had no talent for teaching, and his academic career was hampered by the troubles of his private life. But his writing, especially his first and principal book Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), had a fermenting effect on economic and social thinking in America. In The Radical Academy
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John Dewey (picture) was an American philosopher and educator born in Burlington, Vermont. He studied at Vermont and Johns Hopkins universities, taught at Michigan (1884) and at Chicago (1894), and became professor of philosophy at Columbia University in 1904. At the celebration of his ninetieth anniversary, John Dewey declared that losing faith in our fellow men means losing faith in ourselves, "and that is the unforgivable sin." Dewey is generally recognized by many as America's leading philosopher, and the foremost apostle of the faith in the essential union of the democratic and philosophical spirit. Since his revolt against German philosophy, he repudiated the separation of the individual and the social, both of which, according to him, are concrete traits and capacities of human beings. He always regarded reason, not as something existing timelessly in the nature of things, but simply as a fortunate and complex development of human behavior. His criticism of the traditional notions of truth is embodied in his theory of instrumentalism, which he defines as "an attempt to constitute a precise logical theory of concepts, judgments and inferences in their various forms, by primarily considering how thought functions in the experimental determinations of future consequences." Dewey made inquiry, rather than truth or knowledge, the essence of logic. He regarded philosophy as the criticism of those socially important beliefs which are part and parcel of the social and cultural life of human communities. This criticism involves an examination of the way in which ideas, taken as solutions of specific problems, function within a wider context. It is in this way that a theory of knowledge -- logic, ethics, psychology, aesthetics, and metaphysics becomes necessary and explainable. These are not to be derived from the assumption of an abstract truth, that is, a higher reality or a reality different from that within which we live and act, nor from everlasting values. Dewey objects to transcendental philosophers, because they ignore the kind of empirical situations to which their themes pertain; even the most transcendental philosophers use empirical subject matter, if they philosophize at all. But they become nonempirical because they fail to supply directions for experimentation. The supply of such directions is the core of Dewey's philosophy. His standard of belief and conduct claims to lie within, rather than outside of, a situation of life, that can be shared. Idealists, in contradistinction to Dewey's search for a guide to the beliefs of a shareable situation, deny to common life the faculty of forming its own regulative methods; they claim to have private access to truth. In Dewey's democratic philosophy, common life is the reality of a dignity equivalent to that of nature or the individual. Dewey devoted his studies not only to the conditions but also to the consequences of knowledge. He never made philosophy subservient to the vested interests of any class or nation; nor was he ail afraid to hurt any sensibility. He insisted that philosophy, in contrast to all other human activities, must be allowed to remain outside and above the public domain in order to maintain sound relations with these other human activities and to whose progress it must contribute. Dewey was opposed to any isolation of cognitive experience and its subject matter from other modes of experience and their subject matter, because he attempted to integrate spiritual life into the precise framework of natural phenomena, and, for the sake of all-embracing experience, tried to do away with the distinction between the objective and the subjective, and the psychical and the physical. He denied that the characteristic object of knowledge has a privileged position of correspondence with an allegedly ultimate reality; he insisted that action is involved in knowledge and that knowledge is not subordinate to action or practice; that it is in experimental knowing that genuine intellectual integrity is found. Dewey did not accept any alternative between knowledge or intelligence and action. To him it is "intelligent action" that matters. The failure of human intelligence in social areas has made Dewey strongly emphasize the social aspects of his philosophy. Throughout his long life he tried not only to apply his experimental methods to social philosophy, but he also actively participated in disputes and struggles of political, social, and cultural relevance. Political, social, cultural, and theoretical motives have enhanced Dewey's interest in education. He recognized the important role education plays in the survival of democracy, and the importance of democratic thought and action in the improvement of education. For more than forty years, Dewey maintained a leadership in American education, bringing increased human interest into school life and work, making for the increased encouragement of pupil initiative and responsibility. Dewey's instrumentalism was first expressed in his Studies in Logical Theory (1903) where he acknowledged his obligation to William James. His other principal works are: Democracy and Education (1916); Essays in Experimental Logic (1917); Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); Human Nature and Conduct (1922); The Quest for Certainty (1929), and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). In The Radical Academy
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James Hayden Tufts (1862-1942) After having hesitated between mathematics and philosophy, James Hayden Tufts (picture) concentrated upon studies in the history of philosophy but turned to ethics because he considered changes in moral values and concepts to be of even more significance than changes in science and knowledge. However, his ethical research was not limited to the reading of books. As a professor at the then newly founded Chicago University, Tufts was also a member of the Board of Arbitration, and the chairman of a committee of the social agencies of Chicago; through these affiliations he acquired insight into economic and social struggles which inspired his thinking about the questions of justice, responsibility, rights of the underdog, conflicts of relatively justified claims and other moral problems quite as much as through his studies in the history of ethical principles. In Ethics (in collaboration with John Dewey, 1917), Tufts grouped the various factors of moral changes under the captions of "psychological" and "sociological" agencies. According to him, moral ideas are shaped under the influence of religious, social and economic forces but that they do not remain objects of pure contemplation; they themselves become patterns of action, and thereby modify the state of mind of men involved in social, political and economic struggles. This conception of mutual influences is opposed to both Marxism and idealism. The most urgent task of ethical analysis in the present time was defined by Tufts as the endeavor not to conceive an image of a perfect state of society but to watch the forces which are at work and challenge the habitual concepts of political democracy, capitalism, religious and social institutions. From this point of view Tufts dealt with America's Social Morality (1933). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870-1938) Benjamin Cardozo (picture) was born in New York City. He sat on the bench of the New York Court of Appeals from 1913 until 1932 and in the United States Supreme Court from 1932 until 1938. He handed down important opinions on congressional power, control of interstate commerce, and the relationship of the Bill of Rights to states' rights. He was general liberal, and favored greater involvement of courts in public policy. It has been said of Justice Cardozo, that "by the magic of his pen, he transmuted law into justice." He was one of the greatest American philosophers of law; chief judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York for more than ten years; Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and recipient of many honorary degrees. Justice, to Cardozo, was "a concept far more subtle and indefinite than any that is yielded by mere obedience to a rule. It remains, to some extent, when all is said and done, the synonym of an aspiration, a mood of exaltation, a yearning for what is fine and high." Despite all his sensitivity to the indefinite, Cardozo was also a thinker whose profundity never excluded clear and distinct concepts and definitions. He was aware of the paradoxes and tensions of his profession, yet remained capable of viewing things with plain and simple common sense. He always tried to synthesize law and life, by comprehending the stream of historical life and the chaotic drives of social and economic forces. He was conscious of the necessity for adapting existing forms to newly emergent trends. Cardozo was not a radical, but he was imbued with the spirit of democracy. Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon the death of Cardozo, called this scholar and wise man, a "great soul." Cardozo was devoted to the welfare of the nation, defended the rights of the individual, strove for harmony between contradictory interests staunchly opposed selfish interests, and was a courageous fighter for liberty and truth. In The Radical Academy
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